המכללה האקדמית בית ברל > English > About Us > News > Newsletter > Summer June 2022 > Meeting the Fast-Growing Demand for Professionals in Data Analytics

Meeting the Fast-Growing Demand for Professionals in Data Analytics

At 5:00pm on May 12th, 150 pupils – secular and religious, Jewish and Arab - selected from 17 high schools where data analytics is taught, gathered on Beit Berl’s campus for the 1st ever Data Analytics Hackathon. For the next 14 hours, the pupils worked

together furiously - developing a programming survey for a cable communications company entering the Israeli market. Organized into groups that cut across cultural differences, the pupils utilized analytic tools to create a presentation addressing central questions to the mission: Is there room for another communications company in Israel? Who is the target audience? What is the preferred geographic area?

10 Beit Berl students in the Data Analytics program served as mentors, helping the pupils collect, organize and visualize data, and helped prepare presentations. At 7:00 in the morning, the seven groups presented their ideas, and the winner was selected, though all participants won. The adolescents gained valuable skills from the whirlwind hackathon: teamwork development; working within a limited timeframe; using data analysis in a real-life framework; community-social experience; and familiarity with an institution of higher education. For Beit Berl students, it served as an excellent model for communal collaboration and provided experiential teaching training and exposure to teachers; and for the College, it strengthened the connection with teachers in the field while asserting Beit Berl's place in training for the profession of data analytics.

Data analytics, a rapidly growing field, is the science of analyzing raw data, and representing the analyses in clear, understandable and visually accessible ways, to facilitate effective forecasting and decision making. Data analysts are in high demand in civil, military, scientific and technological fields.

The Ministry of Education recently introduced data analytics as a high school matriculations track. Already, 30 schools in all Israeli streams of education - public education, state-religious, Arab and ultra-Orthodox – teach data analytics. In the coming school year (2022-23), the program will open in 100 new schools, with the aim to launch the program in an additional 300 schools in the 2023-24 school year.

To meet this growing need, Beit Berl College opened a new teacher training program in Data Analytics the 2021-22 academic year. The one-year teaching certification program is designed for Bachelor, Master or Doctoral degree holders in information-rich and data-intensive professions with a technological and scientific orientation. The program trains students to teach data analytics to account for the production of data on a huge scale and the structured collection and analysis of them, required by all fields of science, industry and society. It trains those who are content experts and proficient in teaching data analytics in developing quantitative, managerial and analytical thinking, and in leading project-based learning in the laboratory and in electronic environments.

The program also seeks to develop the infrastructure for further professional development of teachers and school students in the fields of knowledge management, data scientists and information and data engineers to develop such career directions in graduates of the education system.

The 15 students graduating the program this year have all secured jobs in different high schools.